Dana Griffin on AI, belonging, and intergenerational connection

Loneliness is a public health crisis affecting people of all ages. This week on Possible, Reid and Aria sit down with someone using AI to bridge generational gaps and combat the loneliness epidemic. Dana Griffin is co-founder and CEO of Eldera, a global platform using AI to foster intergenerational connections. Raised by her grandparents and mentored by older adults throughout her life, Dana is on a mission to help people see aging as an asset. Dana shares how Eldera uses AI to safely and meaningfully connect kids with older mentors, addressing loneliness, declining mental health, and lost wisdom. They explore how technology can support human connection—rather than replace it—along with what an "age-integrated society” could unlock. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all the episodes, visit https://www.possible.fm/podcast/ To learn more and join Eldera: https://wisdom.eldera.ai/possible Topics: 1:20 - Episode introduction 3:37 - Dana’s early life and how it shaped her perspective on intergenerational bonds 6:09 - How ageism creates a waste of human potential 9:01 - Policy and tech solutions can help reintegrate older adults 12:11 - Social media worsens isolation, but AI can help foster real connection 14:31 - Eldera’s mission of bridging generations through AI-powered mentorship 18:52 - Opposite backgrounds create stronger bonds when matching mentors and mentees 22:44 - Intergenerational mentorship as a form of healthcare 26:34 - Using AI to map and amplify generational knowledge 30:26 - Midroll ad break 30:35 - AI enhances, but never replaces, human connection 34:05 - Encouraging confidence among older adults through Eldera’s wisdom portrait 37:26 - Scaling Eldera and working towards a society where we value the impact of elders 41:17 - The barriers and opportunities of scaling Eldera 44:34 - How cultural perspectives and global views on aging shape intergenerational ties 48:33 - Rapid fire Select mentions: Fei-Fei Li on spatial intelligence and human-centered AI Possible is an award-winning podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Tune in for grounded and speculative takes on how technology—and, in particular, AI—is inspiring change and transforming the future. Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with an ambitious builder or deep thinker on a topic, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education. Each episode seeks to advance our discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Humanity trumps every barrier when people are connected in a safe and nurturing way and they're given an opportunity to make an impact. The fact that we're able to take this brilliant kid and amplify his future with the wisdom of older adults makes not only everyone in that connection better off, but their communities and hopefully society down the road. Selfishly, I want to grow old in a world where older adults matter, where aging is impact, where we have something fabulous to do and we're appreciated because we're doing so much good. This is what gets me really excited, that technology can actually allow us to do this at scale.

• 0:54Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:55Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 0:57Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know how together we can use technology like AI to help us shape the best possible future.

• 1:04Aria Finger?

  We ask technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers to help us sketch out the brightest version of the future, and we learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:14Reid Hoffman?

  This is possible.

• 1:20Reid Hoffman?

  From video calls to messaging apps, technology connects us like never before. It helps us reach people across continents and communities in an instant. And yet, so many of us experience loneliness. According to the American Psychiatric Association, one in three adults in the United States experiences loneliness at least once a week.

• 1:42Aria Finger?

  And it's not just adults. The CDC reports that over 40% of kids and teens feel persistently lonely. For anyone, prolonged social isolation can lead to depression, anxiety, and long-term health issues like dementia for older adults. The reality is clear: loneliness is more than just a feeling. It's a public health crisis.

• 2:06Reid Hoffman?

  And the financial burden of loneliness-related health issues is staggering, clocking in at billions of dollars each year. It's clear that fixing this crisis is going to take more than awareness, like innovative solutions that prioritize human connection.

• 2:22Aria Finger?

  One woman going head to head against this epidemic is Donna Griffin. She's the co-founder and CEO of Eldera, a global platform tackling this issue in a unique and powerful way. Donna started her career in advertising and performance marketing and then pivoted to tech, becoming an entrepreneur and AI for good advocate. Soon after, she founded Inner Wisdom, the precursor to what we now know as Eldera.

• 2:49Reid Hoffman?

  Raised by her grandparents and guided by older mentors throughout her life, Donna has always understood the value of elder wisdom. Now she's bringing that to the world through a platform that bridges generational divides with the help of AI. Donna currently serves on the boards of AI Commons and Bright Focus Foundation, speaking on the importance of using AI for social impact.

• 3:12Aria Finger?

  This week, we explore the mission of Eldera, the power and necessity of intergenerational relationships, and how AI can be a tool for fostering human connection and building stronger communities.

• 3:25Reid Hoffman?

  So let's dive in. Here's our conversation with Donna Griffin.

• 3:37Aria Finger?

  It seems clear from your background that intergenerational connection has been a lifelong theme for you, especially since you were raised by your grandparents. Can you share how these early experiences shaped your perspective on intergenerational relationships and how important they are?

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Yes, thank you for starting there. I don't think my story is really unique around the globe, but it is what made me really, really interested and appreciative of intergenerational stories and intergenerational connections. So I was born in Transylvania in Romania, and I was raised by my grandparents until I was eight, and it taught me so much. You know, my grandparents each spoke a different language to me. One of them read Greek mythology to me, the other one read Rho Verin to me, and we had comparative conversations, and it was a really wonderful upbringing. And when I was eight, my grandma passed away, and I had to move in with my parents for the first time. It was a little more difficult. It was a little difficult as growing up in that situation.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  But what made it really life-changing is that our next-door neighbors were retired teachers, and I think they figured out that I needed help. So they called my parents and said, hey, we need a young person to help around the house, send her over. And so I ended up going over to the neighbors every day and they did my homework with me and they fed me and we played games. And while those formative years were really difficult, I've learned that there is a lot of good out there. Children, sometimes they don't have perspective. They think life is hard and sad. And in many times it is. But if you're just exposed to one different perspective,

• 5:19Speaker 00

  then you can really start seeing a better future for yourself. I ended up moving to the United States for university and I continued meeting amazing older adults who looked out for me. I had an advisor, Anne. She realized I had a hard time kind of making ends meet. So she gave me this booklet of every single scholarship that was published. And she said, listen, you don't qualify for all of them. But if you're the only one applying, you're gonna get it. And I did. And it just made college much easier. And I just had these people that just saw something that I needed help and they wanted to make a difference. And to this day, a third of my friends are between 60s and 90s.

• 6:01Speaker 00

  And I know who to go to for advice on anything from healthcare to dating. And I thought that's kind of how everyone navigated life.

• 6:09Reid Hoffman?

  You know, today, society often discounts, you know, the older population, causing them to be isolated from younger generations. So, you know, share your thoughts on the stereotypes, you know, commonly associated with older adults and how those perceptions impact them, both socially and emotionally, and then how we should be thinking about it? What kinds of connections we should be making?

• 6:31Speaker 00

  Honestly, I see that as the biggest waste of human potential, the largest untapped resource on the planet. Our longevity increased by over 60% just in the past century, which means that up until the 1950s, when retirement was invented, you used to live to work to 65 and live to 68 and you had three golden years. Yay, go have fun. Well, now that changed radically. Healthcare, education, we've increased longevity from sixty-eight to close to eighty-six. But we have not built the social infrastructures to support that new reality. So going away and living your best life in a retirement community for twenty years,

• 7:14Speaker 00

  it's not something that my generation wants, or even the people who are growing old right now. And it's causing huge problems. One of them, and a very public one, is loneliness. It's a very expensive problem, but it's a new problem. Because we used to live in multi-generational homes where older adults had a role to play. They looked after the kids while the middle generation worked. Everybody had a role, everybody had a purpose. And loneliness wasn't a problem. But the reason why I bring this up is we've created this almost like fake social infrastructure that segregates ages, segregates people by age. And it's really causing huge health problems.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  Loneliness in older adults causes a fifty percent increase in dementia. The loneliness cost, just in the US, the CDC estimates is around four hundred and six billion a year. That's unnecessary, by the way. But what's worst is that when we broke up the generation, kids became even lonelier. The CDC says that over forty percent of kids identify as lonely. And they have not yet developed the coping mechanisms to deal with this, which is leading to the highest mental health crisis and youth suicide rates in history. So we came up with this interesting, seemingly innocuous solution seventy-five years ago that down the road has really significant social challenges.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  So the way I look at it, it's almost like there's an invisible network of wisdom out there. We have the largest older generation in history. They are the healthiest, the most educated, and we push them out of society when they're pretty much in the prime of their time.

• 9:01Aria Finger?

  I love how you put it like there's all this compassion and empathy, but also this is also just a numbers game. This is let's look at the lost productivity of our society. Let's look at the increased healthcare costs. Let's look at the wasted human capital. Because although we actually might want people to retire at 65 or 70 to let the sort of younger generation into those leadership roles. I think we talk about that often, especially in our government. That doesn't mean that they can do nothing. You don't have to go from 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week to zero. Like there's all of this human capital that can be spent. And it can have these really positive implications. And so you're talking about human life expectancy increasing over the past years.

• 9:44Aria Finger?

  And there not really being these policy changes. So can you talk about either on the policy perspective, what you would like to see changed? Or maybe even more importantly, how can technology help us address some of these challenges and also opportunities with this increased human life expectancy?

• 10:01Speaker 00

  I think change needs to happen both on the technology and the policy level. This is because one of the biggest issues we've created with ageism is not just it's socially inept. It's actually making older adults feel invisible. So if we want to reengage them and truly have them make a meaningful impact in society, we have to remind them that they're valuable. And that can happen through both policy and technology. We have a billion people over 60 today. And as I said, they're the healthiest and they're the most educated generation we've seen. And that number is about to double. By the time I'm going to be in my 60s, by 2050, it's going to be 2.1 billion.

• 10:45Speaker 00

  We don't have the infrastructure to support that new demographic reality. And just making sure that young people take care of older adults is going to fail pretty soon because we already have more people over 60 than under 10. So that means that we do need an infrastructure change and a policy change to drive that infrastructure change in a way that we kick off what is called the third dividend in the very nerdy aging space, where we now live long enough that we can move past just thinking about studying and thinking about success to moving into thinking about significance. And that's where things get really excited because with this new demographic shift.

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Interestingly, technology has just matured to the way where we can truly, safely, meaningfully connect humans in a way that's beneficial to both. We're encountering new challenges that we don't have solutions for, loneliness being one of them. There isn't actually a scalable solution to loneliness today, and that's where technology can come into play. I think technology and AI can help us do so much good, learn so much, have fun. But there are some intrinsically human core needs and values that only humans can transfer to other humans. But if you tell me that chatbots are going to make you feel less lonely, I will die on that hill. I will fight you. I think only humans can make humans feel less lonely.

• 12:11Reid Hoffman?

  I actually agree with you about the importance of human connection. It's one of the things where I think in terms of, you know, the design of AI chatbots, it should not be trying to isolate you, but actually to help you connect. For example, with Inflection and Pi, if you go to Inflection's, you know, personal intelligence Pi and you say, "Hey, you're my best friend." It says, "No, no, no, I'm your AI companion. Let's talk about your friends. Have you seen any of them recently? Maybe it's time to set up a lunch date." You know, that kind of thing. And I think we want to have the design of these things to be nudging and helping with the human connection. But, you know, you brought up loneliness. Weirdly, we both have older generation feeling lonely and younger generation feeling lonely.

• 12:53Reid Hoffman?

  So, you know, what are the specific roles you're seeing technology playing today, both exacerbating it? And then what are some of the solutions, technology and otherwise?

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Let's start with some of the challenges. Technology inadvertently has made us more lonely and has caused some of the mental health issues in young people. And I'm talking particularly about social platforms. And obviously, they were not intended to cause any harm. But sometimes when we build huge global infrastructures, we really have to get very imaginative to get to the scale effects of it. Reid, Arya, when you and I were growing up, we were told to go out there and change the world. Right? That was the premise. Today, kids are growing up told, "Go out there and save the world." The challenges that are put upon them, whether it's climate, political, migration,

• 13:48Speaker 00

  or mental health, are something that we can't even totally conceive. That's so much pressure to put on young people. And by the way, we do have to rely on them to build a better future. So we have to give them absolutely every leg up that we possibly can. And the only untapped human resource out there today are older adults. And there's so many of them that we can use technology to vet them, train them, and support them. So that every single kid out there growing up today and in the future has not just one, but maybe a task force of older adults who guide them and help them build resilience and give them perspective about life.

• 14:32Aria Finger?

  I'm not sure I 100% agree with you about the change the world, save the world dynamic. Because I do think that, man, World War II was scary. And man, the Cold War. And like every generation sort of has their big global problem they're fighting against. I absolutely agree with you that, you know, when you're 15 and you couldn't see what your friends were doing on Friday nights, and now you can see that they're doing things without you, and you're left out, and you're alone. And like, there are things on social media that have led to or exacerbated some of these things. And I also agree with you that sort of having people in your life who support you is really positive. And I love the ways that technology can help on that front. And so for those of us listeners who don't know about your company, Eldera.ai,

• 15:15Aria Finger?

  I would love for you to talk about the mission of that platform and, you know, why you think it's sort of this unique purveyor of intergenerational conversations.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  I want to start with clarifying something. It is not a unique purveyor. Intergenerational connections are as old as humanity itself. What we've built is an infrastructure that makes it available and accessible to anyone, regardless of geography or mobility, in a way that is both safe and meaningful. And what I mean by that is that we train that and connect older adults to serve as friends and mentors to kids around the world. When we connect a young person and an older adult and they bond and they talk weekly, sometimes two hours a week, because you're right, Ari, kids want to talk to an adult, just not their parent. There's research around this from Harvard that says that when kids build trusted one-on-one

• 16:09Speaker 00

  relationships with non-parental adults, it helps them build resilience. And older adults get purpose. And, you know, we couldn't even do that a few years ago because technology plays a really, really important role. We really use technology in three different ways that are there. First, it's safety. So we built out an AI chaperone that checks every recording for any potential risks, but also learns from what makes a good match, a good conversation, a good pairing, and is able to help us build a better product. The second is matching. People think that, you know, you match people that are similar. Well, what we've learned from almost five years of data is the opposite. My grandparents used to say opposites attract.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Well, our data actually shows that, that when people are really, really different, different geographies, different generations, different cultures, they actually feel so special and unique that it makes them very curious about the other person and both of them start feeling better. They're not trying to fit in with each other. They feel excited about someone who's completely different than them. We can look at a set of variables and figure out points where they will click, or the kids call it the bond, based on their differences, not on their similarities. And that has so many cascading positive externalities.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  It creates incredible health benefits. In fact, the Cleveland Clinic named us a social prescription that solves both loneliness in older adults and mental health in kids. So think about this, two of the most expensive global healthcare problems can be solved with one intergenerational intervention. I think we have an opportunity to take almost a trillion dollars of social capital that's sitting idle and build the infrastructure to turn them into a resource for society. And it's incredibly beautiful that as humans, we are wired to make an impact. One of my mentors, Dean Lindafried of Columbia University, ran some of the seminal researches on generativity in older adults.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  And she defines generativity as the desire to make a younger person's life better, or how we talk about mentoring. And the sense of generativity and feeling useful will keep you healthier longer, but by decades. So that not only reduces our healthcare costs at scale, but it also creates a new social capital. And yet, it's not a solution for everything, but it's something that we can do easily.

• 18:52Reid Hoffman?

  The technologist in me is very curious to ask the following question. My very first startup was called SocialNet and was kind of like helping people make connections as everything from dating, professional networking, roommates, sports things. What have you learned about like the do's and the don'ts of the matching? What is that new human connection that creates joy and interest and learning and intrigue about life on both sides?

• 19:22Speaker 00

  That's something that we have fun with. And it actually brings up the third part of how we use technology at Aldera, which is understanding wisdom. So Aldera started in March 2020. But before Aldera, I was obsessed with this idea of how can we use AI to codify human wisdom like we sequence the genome? Because if we can codify it, then we can help find it in every person and help give them a way to contribute to society with it. So that's where it actually started. And when COVID happened, we realized that's a great theory. So that aside, put people together now because they need each other now. But that initial theory taught us how to ask the right questions about each person.

• 20:04Speaker 00

  So when an older adult or a parent with a kid or a teen joins Aldera, we ask them a series of questions. They're open-ended questions and that's, that's something that's very important. It's not just a dropdown. But one of the most fun ones I can dive into is the superpower question. So. We ask everyone what their superpower is. And let me tell you, the older generation is not used to answering that question. But we do it on purpose because we want them to start thinking positively about themselves from the get-go, from the signup process. It's really important to us. So the responses we get range from anything from my superpower is courage, it's empathy, it's resilience. Wonderful.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Then we get to my superpower is time travel. And I'm like, oh, you're gonna be a fun one. All the way to what kind of question is this? They're all fantastic, valid answers. They tell us just as much about who they are from a professional perspective, let's say, as what their personality is. And I think that's where we really see really beautiful correlations. I'll give you a very specific example. We connected a young girl who was 15 at that point, Justine, who was a Haitian immigrant in Miami. She had just immigrated with her parents to the States maybe a year before, and she was in high school.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  Connected her with 82-year-old Mary Ellen from LA. And Mary Ellen went to Radcliffe. She was on the Board of Excellence since 1984. So we connect the two of them. And what Justine tells me, because we do feedback forms, is that she feels like she's looking at a mirror of herself when she talks to Mary Ellen. And so I asked both of them about it, and they discovered in being so curious about each other that they have a shared childhood experience. So when it came time for Justine to navigate the US and navigate getting into a really good school, and Justine is really, really smart.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  Mary Ellen reached out to the community and got several older adults to help Justine apply to schools and get scholarships.

• 22:20Aria Finger?

  I love it.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  And you know, when you connect two people that are incredibly different, you almost force them to find what they have in common. And that in itself is the bond, and that creates the joy. So Mary Ellen wrote an email to the person who introduced her to Eldera, saying that it was the best introduction she's gotten in 40 years. And it wasn't about Aldera, it was about Justine.

• 22:44Aria Finger?

  I've been so lucky to have mentors in my life, to have people doing me favors, helping me out. I hope I'm also doing that for other people. And if you can sort of bring that joy to so many people who might not have experienced it, for whatever reason, I think is so powerful. And so when you have your younger cohort, it's six to 18 year olds, and you're thinking about that intergenerational connection. Do you think there's something special about sort of six to 18 with the older adults? Are you going to expand to people in your twenties? Like, why focus on that demo? May you change? Or you think that's where sort of the special sauce is?

• 23:18Speaker 00

  I started there because I believe that young people need the most support. I mean, it's not just that I believe. Data shows globally that young people need the most support. Young people are also the hardest to build technology for. A lot of people build technology for the 20, 30 year olds and so forth. But you have to be incredibly mindful about how you build technology that keeps young people safe. And that's what I really, really think that technology has evolved in a way that it's only now allowing us to do that well at scale. That's why we started with the kids. They need it the most and we can do it now. We do not build things fast and break things. Like, we're the opposite of that. We're dealing with the two of the most vulnerable populations on the planet.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  We build very slow, but it also works. Here's the really interesting hack that we've realized lately. So we always have more kids sign up than older adults. Because parents see their kids use and love Aldera and they tell the other parents. And then for every parent that signs up, 12 new parents sign up. Mentors tell their best friend. So that's a little bit of a problem there that we're solving now with technology, with what we call the wisdom footage. We can talk about that later. But what we've realized now is that parents sign up for Aldera because they want the access to the mentors too. Now it's really taking us down this path where just recently, in the past few weeks,

• 24:43Speaker 00

  we have really big companies reach out to us saying, we want to offer Aldera as an employee benefit. Because our employees who are parents are the most stressed generation. And we think that you can help them out, both with their parents and their kids. So that's why we will eventually grow into other areas. But I want to clarify that Aldera stands for the era of the elders. So our atomic unit, our core, is the older adult. We look at the older adult not as someone who needs care, but as the person who cares. So when we build technology, it's really to understand what makes them special, which is what we call the wisdom portrait.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  And how can we offer them opportunities to contribute where they feel incredibly valuable? The first one is connect them to kids, which gives them purpose, they live longer, it's great. The second one, which they kind of already started hacking Aldera doing this, is connecting them to each other in a way that they can age in place. In fact, there are many friendships who started on Aldera, now they have walking groups. But the third one, and I think what's really, really interesting is that older adults helped me and my team build Aldera. They wrote a 32-page manual on how to Aldera for new mentors. They have this incredible wisdom, they have time on their hands. So we're going to allow down the road for companies to tap into the wisdom, really wisdom reservoir that we're building,

• 26:07Speaker 00

  and get older adults to help them with content, with accounting, with whatever it is on a part-time basis in a way that keeps older adults financially stable long-term. I think we're just building a social infrastructure that allows for older adults to continue to make an impact in the world. So ideally, we're going to be solving multiple problems for multiple people. But really, the core is building this global network of human wisdom.

• 26:34Reid Hoffman?

  There's so many different threads here that are super interesting. But like, one of them is What is the way in which you're connecting the kind of elder generations also to each other? And then say a little bit about what you're learning. Kind of what are some of the patterns of discovering the wisdom from the elder generations?

• 26:52Speaker 00

  So I'd like to take full credit for the older adult to older adult. And I can't. When I mean that older adults are building this with us, they really do. So it was maybe two months into Aldera when they called me and they said, sweetheart, it's great talking to the young people, but we want to talk to each other to see what the others are doing to be good mentors. And we're like, oh, okay, cool. Let's do that. Let's do that. So then we started what we call mentor council. Every two weeks, we do a big group Zoom. And they talk to each other and then they also tell me how to build Aldera better, which is the most incredible thing I can tell you. Literally, everything we build comes from them. So they started talking to each other and I would follow up these conversations with these long emails, you know, agendas of what they talked about.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  And they're like, you know, sweetheart, your emails are really, really great, but we can't find anything in them. So can you build something so we can talk to each other in between mentor council? And we're like, oh, okay, we can do that. Yes. So we wickeled a social platform. After older adults get criminal background checked and trained, they get invited into the platform and they talk to each other about everything. They they start with mentoring. They start with introducing themselves and mentoring. But then they talk about movies and books and they now have a book club and socials that they all created amongst themselves. So initially, it was completely organic. And then what they said is, you know, when I was a new mentor,

• 28:20Speaker 00

  I was so nervous that I didn't have something special to give, that I wasn't good enough, that, yeah, Judy's great with kids, but I'm not really great with kids. Why would you even want me here? So what we realize is very important to connect a new person with an existing mentor, who is actually a little more similar to them. This is where it's very interesting. So there are different, completely different types of matching that we look at. Give an example, we never match a kid and older adult in the same geographic area. We did it on purpose because I don't want them meeting in the park. There's a lot of implications for that. The benefit of that is that parents pack up the kids and travel across the country or across the world to meet the mentors.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  With mentors, the older adults, we do want to connect them in the same geographic area. We do want them to have similarities because then they feel like, if Judy can do it, maybe I could do it too. And that takes me to your second part of the question, which is about the wisdom. How do we really understand the wisdom? There are several inputs that we take into consideration in building this, what we call the Wisdom Network. So one is the self-expressed profile, which is just scratching the surface. But then, every single conversation that happens at Aldera is recorded and archived for safety. That is how we use the AI Shephron to understand what happened in the conversation. But that is also how we understand the deeper contextual wisdom of each older adult.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  And to get like super nerdy, we define wisdom as the triangulation of all the knowledge you've gathered throughout your life, filtered through your own life experience, and applied with your own common sense, which makes it as unique to you as your fingerprint. So it doesn't matter if you're a retired CEO, or if you're a grandma who knows how to take care of primies, or you give really good dating advice. Your wisdom is incredibly valuable and it's our job to build a technology that elevates that and connects you with opportunities to contribute.

• 30:35Reid Hoffman?

  So we're discovering these sources of wells of kind of human wisdom that are like these massive depth of human capital, human wisdom, you know, that is largely untapped, that could be delightfully deployed in the world. So, you know, a natural thought today is like, well, how do we get that trained into AIs? How do we get that in interactions that might make a difference, kind of in a captured, scalable, interactive way? So what have your thoughts on that been so far? And what might we see you kind of enabling or designing or, you know, considering in the future?

• 31:12Speaker 00

  So I think AI today already has some of that information. So when I started thinking about how do we codify wisdom, I went back to those things. And I looked at everything from African proverbs to philosophy to commencement speeches. And then I started triangulating all of those different sets of data to start creating a wisdom graph. But that was called inner wisdom. That was pre-elder. I think what's very, very different about connecting humans based on their wisdom is that when they connect across generations, they actually transfer something much more human that AI can't. They can build resilience in the

• 31:53Speaker 00

  younger generation. They can teach them about empathy in a way that even Pi, which I love, by the way, can not quite do, like a grandma who survived the war. And they can teach emotional intelligence. And in the future that we're going towards, those most human skills are going to be the most valuable because everything else we can do with technology, and certainly I do a lot with technology, it's a great helper for me, the where we're going. Is what I'm hoping and I'm, well, this is why we're building Aldera, is what we like to call an age-integrated society. So today, we look at the big systematic scale issues in silos.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  We look at healthcare and separately, we look at education. And if we just look at intergenerational connections, they can drive health outcomes. So we already know when we connect older adult to young person, they each feel better and then healthcare costs go down. Cognitive decline gets delayed. Mental health issues go down. But then kids also learn some of the most human traits that they can possibly get from a person who cares about them, not from a curriculum at school or from a chatbot. So I think that if we look at integrating older adults in society based on their wisdom and create this vast network of wisdom, then we can impact education as well. And I'm a big sci-fi fan.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  So to give you an example, one of the seminal books that helped me in this was Diamond Age. So Diamond Age talks about how can you create social mobility through education and the education primer was actually a combination of AI and a human whose care went into it. And those two together was with drove high societal change. And I would be lying if I said there was not an inspiration behind Aldera. I think that every kid deserves to have a person who cares about them and shows up for them no matter what. And that is actually possible today because of technology.

• 34:06Aria Finger?

  I mean, I love that. And I certainly agree that actually some of these sort of EQ interpersonal skills might become more important as we go forward as AI is taking care of everything else. I have two technology questions for you. One is on your platform, are people communicating via video, voice chat? And if it's different ways, do you see different outcomes depending on how people are communicating? And then secondly, you know, earlier you talked about how, you know, my friend Judy is so good at the, you know, talking to young people, but I'm not. And one of the things that AI is so good at is sort of being that coach, being that helper, helping people along. Do you guys use AI or plan to in the future to sort of help the mentors, be the best mentors that they can by giving them those prompts?

• 34:50Speaker 00

  So we built Aldera, you could only Aldera one way. And The mentors use it as a verb, and now we all use it as a verb, which is one-on-one weekly video conversations. That allowed us to record and archive the conversation, keep everyone safe. Video conversation also gives us very rich data, because we can look at the transcript for safety, but we can also look at facial expressions and tonality, to pick up safety and candidly also joy. Because when we share Aldera, we share videos about Aldera, they come from those conversations that the parents and the mentors service for us. Now, we're opening up a new way to interact. So we are now welcoming every older adult over 60 who doesn't have a criminal background to join our social platform,

• 35:36Speaker 00

  our closed Aldera platform, and join socials and meet other mentors and be part of even intergenerational socials. We sometimes have intergenerational socials around mental health or AI, where kids and older adults and parents all come together. We believe that that pathway will give them the confidence to say, "I can do this too." So that means that they're going to be able to participate in social platforms. They're going to get opportunities to contribute, not just to the kids. Now, we will be using AI to support mentors in many ways. But one thing that makes us completely different from any intergenerational solution out there is that we are not at all curriculum-based on purpose. We think older adults are the last generation

• 36:21Speaker 00

  who still know how to build that true human relationship, to pull it out of the kid, you know, to get them to play guitar for the first time on the screen, which they wouldn't do. So while we give them potential prompts on how to better help, we want to make sure that technology at Aldera never, ever disrupts the human connection. It only amplifies it. One particular thing that we're looking to build out is there are already amazing algorithms out there that can surface early mental health distress in kids. And I think Fei-Fei Li was the one who built the first sample of that. And in talking to the Cleveland Clinic, we realized that if we can pick up on very early stages of mental health distress in a conversation like this, and we prompt the older adults to say,

• 37:06Speaker 00

  "Hey, ask Cecilia about what happened at school." We could solve that little issue right away rather than letting it get worse. So we will be using AI in those ways in potentially alerting older adults to opportunities to do good by using their capabilities, but above and beyond what they might actually pick up.

• 37:26Reid Hoffman?

  What are some of the, what you might be seeing in this kind of learning loop of the generations in humanities? Or anything that you're seeing yet? It may be early, it may be harder to capture in this, but it's, it's one of the things, you know, obviously having just published super agency, it's kind of thinking about like what the progress of knowledge is and kind of capabilities. And I'm curious if there's anything in particular you've seen there.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  Absolutely. That's the long-term vision. We believe that older adults have this incredible, we call it wisdom, but we can really break it down to very interesting intuitive pattern recognition, contextual pattern recognition. Young people are very quick learners and we see the transfer of wisdom in almost every connection. I can give you a couple of examples. So for instance, one of our now front-end engineer was an elder MNT and he was an elder MNT for a few years and he's brilliant, Jackson. And we paired him up with this amazing legendary engineer who built the first Netflix app. He built Pinterest pin and he just retired

• 38:28Speaker 00

  from Pinterest three years ago. So we paired those two together and Kent, the engineer in his sixties, he doesn't really like to code anymore, even though he's brilliant at consumer tech, because it's a little hard on his eyes. All Jackson wants to do is code. So we pair them together. They're actually building the next generation of Eldera. They're building our front end that we're launching in a couple of weeks. Neither of them could do it alone, but together they're really elevating and they are planning so many cool things. When they talk on our team calls, they're so in sync. So that's one way. The second, the higher version of this is imagine when we do that at scale.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Imagine where every older adult wisdom does not perish with them, but it amplifies a young person's curiosity and intellect. It really is a loop. In fact, to get nerdy, our logo is a stylized Fibonacci sequence.

• 39:27Reid Hoffman?

  That is definitely math nerdy.

• 39:29Aria Finger?

  I mean, I was so obsessed with the Fibonacci sequence when I was a kid. So I really love that.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  So we see this idea of intergenerational wisdom transfer at scale. As the human Fibonacci sequence is the golden ratio, the golden mean, where everything builds on each other in the most beautiful and natural way. This is what gets me really excited, that technology can actually allow us to do this at scale. Because today, let's say, a brilliant kid from Idaho, rural Idaho, this is a specific example, their only access to a mentor or wisdom is either geographically, in their small town, or in social media. But now we can connect them with a retired engineer in Silicon Valley,

• 40:18Speaker 00

  or grandma in another small town who went through similar things. We can connect them to a college prep person, a retired college prep person, to get advice on how to get into best colleges. The fact that we're able to take this brilliant kid and amplify his future with the wisdom of older adults makes not only everyone in that connection better off, but their communities and hopefully society down the road. Also, one of my biggest hopes is that the generation that grows up today having an older adult mentor, when they get older, they see aging differently. I think that's incredibly important because...

• 41:00Speaker 00

  Selfishly, I want to grow old in a world where older adults matter, where aging is impact, where we have something fabulous to do and we're appreciated because we're doing so much good. And to do that, we really have to shift perspective now.

• 41:16Aria Finger?

  Oh, absolutely. And you teed up my next question perfectly. You talked a lot about Aldera scaling. And once you hit on something like this that you love, of course, your primary objective is helping the older adults. Secondary objective of helping these young people, it's healthcare, it's education. So what are the barriers to scale? And then what are the opportunities with the coming of scale?

• 41:41Speaker 00

  The barriers initially, it was making sure that we have a product that is safe. And I didn't want to scale too fast. I just want to make sure that we build in every safety feature. Then what we've learned is that this is so counterintuitive, but it was the older adults not feeling like they have something to give, which breaks my heart. Because I feel like every single person I meet is so brilliant and kind, and they have something so amazing to give. So now we are actually building technology that's allowing them to remember what makes them special. And this is where AI comes in. You know, the wisdom portrait that I mentioned is from the moment you sign up, rather than just taking all of your inputs to create the best match for you,

• 42:26Speaker 00

  we're actually create a very simple and friendly output that reminds you what makes you special and how you can give back to society. And you can share it with your friends and invite them to get their own wisdom portrait. And you know what? If you use it at Aldera, fantastic. But if you just take that wisdom portrait and apply it externally in your own community, that's fantastic, too. The goal is the same. So scaling at the person level, if you want, at the member level, is really reminding ourselves that unfortunately, society has created ageism.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  Which has negative effects. In fact, there's research that if you have a negative view on aging, you're going to live something like nine years less than if you have a positive view on aging. And we can change that. The second thing is policy. So I've been working with Medicare and Medicaid innovation. And we were talking about how can we use an intergenerational connection, whether it's Aldera or something else, to lower both Medicare and Medicaid costs with one intervention. So Medicare spends 6.7 billion only on loneliness in older adults. Medicaid spends 5.8 billion, I believe 55% of their budget, on mental health for kids. What if this one intervention at scale could completely redirect that healthcare funding to other areas?

• 43:47Speaker 00

  So policy is very, very important. You know, it's a long road ahead in getting this implemented at a country level. There are other countries who are very interested in implementing this as a national level. In fact, the five countries most affected by loneliness also correlated with the highest longevity and are also some of the richest countries, which are the US, obviously, UK, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. I think really the next step for us is integrating Aldera into healthcare policies. That's a longer road. A shorter road, which, again, I cannot take credit for,

• 44:28Speaker 00

  is that companies actually want to give this to their employees to help them be happier.

• 44:34Reid Hoffman?

  As you've begun getting to scale, have you determined any kind of, almost like, call it best practices wisdom that goes across different cultural groups? Like, I can imagine that in different regions of, you know, the US or other countries, different communities, there kind of is different ideas and different understandings about which ways the elder experience and wisdom might be best engaged? Like, one of the many, many different interesting things that comes out of scale is like, understanding like where we could learn the best of across communities or culture.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  I think the first question I get, well, how do you make sure that adults are culturally sensitive? This is a very interesting way of putting it.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  When you connect a young person with an older adult and they start caring about each other, those walls kind of fall down. And you know what? The older adult might be calling the kid sweetheart, and they just roll with it. I think it's really all about the human connection and the care that can outdo any of those barriers. You don't see that in social media. In fact, those types of generational wisdom or habits or cultural inclinations are a big hindrance in social media. They are not in one-on-one connections. I think that's what makes it very, very different. In fact, we are very hot in South Korea right now. We had the South Korean dad find us very early on when we got written up in Time for Kids

• 46:07Speaker 00

  by this undercover 10-year-old journalist, Nora, who signed up for Aldera. And then she wrote a big piece about it that ended with, Aldera was like an escape from quarantine for me? Well, from that piece, we got picked up by South Korean postdocs. And long story short, an 11-year-old South Korean, helped by his mentor, published his first book, Beautiful Theorems That Changed Math, that is on sale on Amazon. And all the proceeds are going to the Pediatric Cancer Society. And I'm giving you these examples because what we've learned is that humanity trumps every barrier when people are connected in a safe and nurturing way

• 46:51Speaker 00

  and they're given an opportunity to make an impact. So whether it's convincing a kid to write a book and publish it or helping a kid get into school. Also, a conversation in our mentor council was, kids want to become YouTubers. Now imagine 70-some-year-olds talk about the pros and cons of becoming a YouTuber, but like supporting the kid's vision with it. And the last example I want to give, it all comes down to truly, truly human empathy, is one of our mentors, Connie. She's in upstate New York. She's a retired teacher, and she's mentoring a six-year-old kid in Austin. And she was interviewing the kid like, how would you want to do when you grow up? You know, what are your goals?

• 47:36Speaker 00

  And the kid, who's normally super bubbly, said, my goal is to not die. And it just stopped the conversation because apparently there was a school shooting. And so the little girl was afraid to go to school. And so Connie immediately reached out to the mom. They had a conversation about how to support a kid. But then she reached out to me and said, I want to make sure that everyone in the community is aware of how school shooting affect kids.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  And about a quarter of our community doesn't have kids or grandkids. So they kind of hear about school shootings in an abstract. Well, now suddenly, when your kid, because they called them my kid, tells you they're afraid to die, you do something about it. They are organizing now locally to change local legislature to support the kids. These are just examples of human empathy that come out of relationships that would have never otherwise happened.

• 48:41Reid Hoffman?

  All right, rapid fire. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 48:48Speaker 00

  I grew up in communist Romania. As you know, I was eight when communism fell. And the first two TV shows that came to Romania after the revolution, one of them was Star Trek. So imagine a kid who grew up in communism, who had like two hours of TV and maybe three hours of electricity, suddenly sees Star Trek: Next Generation, Picard, All In. I think Star Trek completely changed the realm of possibilities in my brain. It rewired my brain to look for opportunities. And I was so excited about it. And to this day, I watch literally every Star Trek episode that's out there. I became vegetarian because of Star Trek,

• 49:32Speaker 00

  because now I believe that any species that has two eyes is too close to my species. We can go down there for two. But I'm such a huge fan and I continue to be a huge fan of Star Trek. And I think that some of the seeds that it planted in me when I was eight are hopefully coming through through Aldeira today.

• 49:51Aria Finger?

  That is awesome. What is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 49:57Speaker 00

  I think people should ask me about my best party trick. So if you

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Are potentially more introverted or you get invited to like super cool parties and you wonder, how did I get invited to this? And I don't know anyone here and everyone is so ridiculously cool. Then my best trick is find the oldest person in the room and start a conversation with them because you're gonna have a fascinating conversation and you're going to feel welcomed. And case in point, about a year ago, I went to a friend's birthday party and I just didn't know anyone. And I found this gentleman with a yellow jacket, older years, I can't quite tell, but definitely the oldest person in the room with his wife. I went up to them, started a conversation.

• 50:42Speaker 00

  We talked about wisdom and books and the most incredible like topics you can imagine. And at the end of the evening, I realized I was talking to Kevin Kelly and now we're friends. And I had no idea, I didn't put two and two together. I was aware of his work, but I genuinely did not recognize him in this like jazz club situation. So that's my best party trick and I would like to share it with everyone who has ever felt like they didn't really belong somewhere.

• 51:10Reid Hoffman?

  I think I've seen that yellow jacket and Kevin Kelly is a great futurist who I love a lot of his work. So next question, where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?

• 51:26Speaker 00

  I am so excited about the intersection of AI and healthcare and personalized care. I have friends who work in rare diseases and I get to learn from them how they're thinking about AI solving rare diseases because as I've learned, rare diseases are not rare. Even through the lens of solving rare diseases, if you really pan out, you can start looking at personalized healthcare because all three of us are completely different. And we should have healthcare that that understands us and matches us and solves our own solutions. I'm very excited about that, both from an aging perspective because I want people to live healthier, longer so they can serve on Edelweiss and help young people.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  But also it's just fascinating to understand how much more we can grasp and how much more we can solve with AI and healthcare. So that's what I'm most excited about.

• 52:17Aria Finger?

  Last question. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve? If everything breaks humanity's way in the next 15 years and what's our first step to get there?

• 52:27Speaker 00

  So first, we're about to live in the world. Where there's more older adults than young people, where it's a complete demographic shift, where we have this incredible generation coming on board. I think it's possible. And if I have something to say probable in the next 15 years is that we build a new social infrastructure where our aging becomes an asset to humanity, where countries with the highest aging are not worried about their healthcare, but are boasting about their reservoirs of wisdom that they have. Because I want to make sure that we all get to grow old in a world where aging is not just inevitable, but it's invaluable.

• 53:09Aria Finger?

  I love that final thought. Donna, such a joy to hear about what you're doing. Thank you so much for being here.

• 53:14Speaker 00

  Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

• 53:16Reid Hoffman?

  And as someone who is only a few years away from that 60-year-old, a great delight. Thank you.

• 53:29Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schlied, Vanessa Handy, Aliyah Yates, Paloma Moreno Jimenez, and Malia Agudelo. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.

• 53:50Aria Finger?

  Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saïda Sepieva, Fanasi Dilos, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patel, and Ben Relis. And a big thanks to Camille Ricketts and Little Monster Media Company.